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drives which don't mount

937 views 3 replies 3 participants last post by  mac-seraphe 
#1 ·
MacGurus, my greetings and thanks for any past help. I am forced at present, to boot off an external drive, since the internal ones are not recognized. How do I make them visible. Disk utility doen't even see them. Is there another application I can use? Or should I just take the G4 tower in and forget it there?

Thanks in ad. for any help in this time of extreme frustration.

Mac
 
#2 ·
One of two things is happening with your internal drive:

1) It's not plugged in
2) It's defective

Chances are it's one or the other. Defective drives usually don't show up in Disk Utility. And if they do, they usually crash Disk Utility if you try to format them.

(How many drives are you talking, 1, 2?) - Could also be that the ATA controller on the logic board they're plugged into could be defective, but I find that unlikely. Nevertheless, you can't rule it out completely.

Suggestion: Take the apparent defective drive out and put it in an external case. Boot from a CD on the G4 and see if you can see the problmatic drive under Disk Utility off of the CD - if you can't see it, the drive is defective.
 
#3 ·
I had a problem like this from one of the drives I bought off this site. It was a SCSI Barracuda of some type, but OS 9 couldn't recognize it, let alone initialize it.

After much headache an numerous jumper fiddling, I discovered that i needed another program to low-level format it to be able to be recognized by my computer. I think what I used was called FWB tools or something, I had it on a disc my uncle gave me.

However, if these discs were once recognized by your mac and now aren't.... uh oh.
 
#4 ·
Oh BTW, the low-level formatting took forever and I thought it jammed up so I left it over night running. In the morning it was all fixed and now the drive can be easily recognized.

I think it has something to do with unsupported disk drivers, or that the mac os can install new ones on the disc for some reason. Anyway try it out. Another good program is DiscWarrior, but I think it's like 100 bucks.
 
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